Ancient history

1993:Doom arrives to our college Silicon Graphics workstations, and proceeds to blows our vulnerable minds. A life-long passion for first-person-shooters is born, and course grades begin to slide.

1993-1996: College years through which we continue to blow each other’s Doom’ified brains out, repeatedly, in marathon Doom Deathmatches. College degrees are eventually achieved, and with some distinction if we may say so ourselves, despite our best and sincerest efforts to sacrifice our professional futures for more Deathmatch frags.

1996-2012: Careers, families, kids. You know, life stuff.

Modern history

Inception

January 11th, 2013, 11:03 pm: After getting his virtual butt kicked yet again in some serious FPS action, Ilya – The Restless One among us – decides to purchase a gadget that helps improve one’s aim at the center of the screen in FPS games. He doesn’t find one for sale anywhere on the Internet. So he becomes intrigued.

January 11th, 2013, 11:47 pm: Ilya draws a cross on a transparency film, attaches it to the webcam at the top of the monitor, calibrates the contraption so that the cross is aligned with the center of the screen, gives it an FPS whirl… and sees that it is Good. He calls upon his old brothers in virtual arms, and the work begins.

R&D

The first prototype was made out of Lego, and it actually worked (and still works!) quite well. This to us was an unequivocal proof of concept — the idea was solid and it was proven to bring tangible results!

Our first attempt at a custom-cut plastic model wasn’t sufficiently stable on all types of monitors and TV’s we wanted it to support, so further Lego prototyping ensued.

We eventually arrived at a much improved Lego version that gave us a very close approximation of the gadget’s main building blocks and dimensions. This prototype could be mounted on anything, even a refrigerator.

With these final dimensions in hand, we developed two production prototypes for this gaming gadget. The simple, utilitarian model that got the job done inexpensively, and was designed to be the gamer’s workhorse. The steampunk model, made of metal, was destined for limited release to true connoisseurs.